Connective Visions

The end of February is giving rise to a kind of media, climatic, and geographical mass effect. The 16th day of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics came on the heels of another Northeast U.S. snowstorm (the third of the month, but in Philadelphia, happily, the least bothersome) and on the day of the seventh-largest earthquake in [...]

Today I sporadically followed the results of the curling semifinals on NBC’s Olympic Web site and on my beloved Facebook group, The Norwegian Olympic Curling Team’s Pants, as I didn’t have the station access (or time) to watch the whole match. The group’s updates were most reassuring as NBC had the Norway vs. Switzerland results [...]

Thanks to Facebook, I have found myself tonight not only blogging on the Norwegian Olympic curling team but waiting with bated breath for an AP scoop related to them. Some might say that Facebook has much to answer for. A large number of fans on Facebook have been saying so tonight. At roughly 0300 GMT, [...]

I’m a terrific fan of the Winter Olympics. I am no fan at all of sports commentary, and I generally ignore it. But several comments on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics have caught my attention and seem worth a bit of critical probing. One was Andy Rooney’s closing remarks to the American news-magazine show 60 Minutes [...]

In an excellent bit of questioning, a friend remarked to me that most of my Facebook postings seemed to be about “imaginary farm animals” and professed that she didn’t understand the penchant of so many for “electronic farming.” A day later, four more friends joined the Facebook group “I dont care about your farm, or [...]

Upon visiting my father in the living room, where he was watching the midday news, I got a dose of the commercials used to target his audience group. They are dominantly directed toward senior citizens, with the assurance that the viewers are incapable of “regular” lives. Most advertising comes from pharmaceutical companies and describes a [...]